Reaction to the Mortgage Foreclosure Settlement

Following up on Mark's posts, Matt Yglesias from Slate has some reactions to the foreclosure fraud settlement.  He gives a brief background on the case, then argues that the settlment ($26 billion) was too small and that the government missed a chance to push for large scale reform/destruction of the big banks:

I don't want to be the kind of guy who sniffs at a $26 billion settlement, but the reality is that's a relatively small amount of money. It's small relative to the $250 billion (nominal) tobacco settlement from the late 1990s. Certainly it's small relative to the $700 billion in total underwater mortgage debt outstanding in the United States.

Steve Clowney